Oracle lights Sparcs, breaks database record

SAN JOSE, Calif. Ė Oracle announced a system using its Sparc processors and Solaris operating system that executed more than 30 million transactions/minute, leapfrogging competitors IBM and Hewlett-Packard by a wide margin. The company also announced an upgraded Sparc processor and progress on a next-generation chip.

Oracle's chief executive Larry Ellison reiterated his commitment to delivering integrated hardware and software systems based on technologies acquired with Sun Microsystems in April 2009. The company's so-called Sunrise program "is all about Sparc and Solaris, those two foundational technologies that will lead the industry into the next generation systems," said Ellison.

All business systems makers are riding the trend to integrated systems. While Oracle focuses on linking chips and systems to its databases and applications, HP and Cisco have taken an approach of integrating a wider range of computer and communications gear.

"Someone wrote a book called The Sun Also Rises," he quipped. "For all our competitors running their Sundown programs, this marks the end of that," he said, referring to IBM and HP efforts to grab Sun's customers after the Oracle acquisition.

As a proof point, Oracle announced a high-end configuration of a new Sun Sparc cluster delivered 30,249,699 transactions/minute on the TPC-C benchmark, beating a four-month-old record on an IBM cluster of 10 million. HP held the previous record with an Intel Itanium based Superdome system at four million.

The Sun team integrated flash memory into servers in a way that Oracle's database software can use it as a new part of the memory hierarchy, optimizing performance, Ellison said.

Oracle also announced the Sparc VII+ processor and new member of its M-series servers using it, both co-developed with longtime Sun partner Fujitsu. The VII+ doubles to 12 Mbytes the amount of level-two cache and raises the data rate to 3 GHz to deliver about 20 percent more performance than the existing four-core, dual-threaded chip.

In addition, Oracle gave an update on the T4, its next-generation Sparc processor. Like the T3, it will sport up to eight cores running up to eight threads each. However each core will have significantly higher single-thread performance, said John Fowler, head of Oracle's systems group.

Several iterations of the T4 chip are performing "extremely well" in tests of working silicon at the company's Santa Clara, Calif., lab, Fowler said.

As for software, Ellison said the next version of the Solaris operating system will be available soon. Oracle's middleware and applications are already being based on Sun's Java language, he added.

In a study of its customers before the Sun acquisition, Oracle found Solaris was their most widely used operating systems, Ellison said. Solaris and Linux represented nearly 80 percent of its installed systems, he said.

An HP spokesperson said HP's business storage and servers segment saw 25 percent revenue growth year over year during Q4 FY2010. "HP was the only major Unix vendor that reported server growth," he said.

Indeed there are many ways to manipulate benchmarks and I am sure the big three know them all. The good news to me inm this story is that Oracle continues to back Sparc, Solaris and Java, keeping those techs viable.

Using the $/performance metric, former record (IBM) is $1.38, Oracle is $1.01, 27% better. However, IBM system was available 10/13/2010, but the Oracle/Sun system won't be available until June 2011, i.e., 8 months later. In 8 months, system performance will probably advance more than 27%. So Larry's big announcement really is not that big a deal.

3X performance in 4 months is simply not possible. They basically did it with a much larger and more expensive machine. This per system/cluster metric is very questionable. Is a supercomputer one system? That surely will beat all records.

Sorry, but today for 100.000 items I do not need disk space or database at all. Even 100.000 items of 10MByte each -- HiRes photos supplied -- is just 1TB. Even a single CPU slot standard PC server board supports 128 GByte of ECC RAM. So, put 16 of these in a cluster and run the whole shop completely in memory.

IMHO TPC-C is like a Formula 1 car race. Both have absolutely nothing to do with "real life". The TPC-C description states: "Each warehouse tries to maintain stock for the 100,000 items in the Company's catalog and fill orders from that stock." In the "real world" no mentally sane CIO would accept such a massive hardware for such a tiny problem.

The Oracle machine and code runs 3 times faster than IBM's alternative and that leapfrogging happened in just four months? Wow. How would you like to be the IBM sales guy trying to sell against Oracle right now? The only guy envying the IBM salesman right now is the guy from HP.